An aim of modern medicine is to provide personalized or individualized treatment regimens. Those are treatment regimens which take into account a patient's individual needs or risks. Personalized or individual treatment regimens shall be even taken into account for emergency measures where it is required to decide on potential treatment regimens within short periods of time. Heart diseases are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the Western hemisphere. The diseases can remain asymptomatic for long periods of time. However, they may have severe consequences once an acute cardiovascular event, such as myocardial infarction, as a cause of the cardiovascular disease occurs.
Heart failure is a condition that can result from any structural or functional cardiac disorder that impairs the ability of the heart to fill with or pump a sufficient amount of blood throughout the body. Even with the best therapy, heart failure is associated with an annual mortality of about 10%.
Heart failure often remains undiagnosed, particularly when the condition is considered “mild”. The conventional diagnostic techniques for heart failure are based on the well known vascular volume stress marker NT-proBNP. However, the diagnosis of heart failure under some medical circumstances including atrial fibrillation based on NT-proBNP appears to be incorrect for a significant number of patients but not all (e.g., Beck 2004, Canadian Journal of Cardiology 20: 1245-1248; Tsuchida 2004, Journal of Cardiology, 44:1-11). However, especially patients which suffer from heart failure and which exhibit atrial fibrillation would urgently need—besides medical interventions for the atrial fibrillation—a supportive therapy of the heart failure. On the other hand, as a consequence of an incorrect diagnosis of heart failure, many patients will receive a treatment regimen which is insufficient or which may have even adverse side effects.
Therefore, there is a need for diagnostic measures which allow a reliable and fast diagnosis of heart failure in patients exhibiting atrial fibrillation in order to allow for an efficient medical treatment regimen.
The technical problem underlying the present invention can be seen as the provision of means and methods for complying with the aforementioned needs. The technical problem is solved by the embodiments characterized in the claims and herein below.